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Friday, October 10, 2014

Microsoft's Rights Protected Folder Explorer is a utility that Microsoft released to allow you to use Rights Management on any file type. It works very similar to a zip/unzip application by allowing you to create an RPF file and sticking unencrypted files into it. It will encrypt/decrypt using Microsoft's RMS policies that are defined in your environment.

This application is going away. If you're looking for a this ability, you should be aware that support for the software will end on 8/27/2015. Microsoft has replaced the application with a much better product called the Microsoft Rights Management Sharing Application. This app will let you protect anything with RMS works a lot better than Rights Protected Folder Explorer.

Unfortunately, I need to make RPFE available. To deploy it, I chose App-V 5.

During the sequencing, I stumbled upon a weird error. With some trial an error, I was able to decode the log file and figure out what the problem was.

The error was:

Microsoft Rights Protected Folder Explroer Setup Wizard ended Prematurely
Microsoft Rights Protected Folder Explorer Setup Wizard ended prematurely because of an error. Your system has not been modified. To install this program at a later time, run Setup Wizard again. Click the finish button to exit the Setup Wizard.

This error occurs right after you agree to the EULA, and is about as worthless of an error as you can get.

Knowing a bit about how Microsoft Installs software, I went looking for an MSI install log. I managed to find one in %appdata%\temp\1 called Setup_rpfe00001.log.

MSI (c) (00:54) [10:30:59:510]: Connected to service for CA
interface.

Action ended 10:30:59: RetrieveMuOptInStatus. Return value
3.

DEBUG: Error 2896:
Executing action RetrieveMuOptInStatus failed.

The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing
this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is
2896. The arguments are: RetrieveMuOptInStatus, ,

Action ended 10:30:59: WelcomeDlg. Return value 3.

MSI (c) (00:08) [10:30:59:666]: Doing action: FatalError

I chose to focus on RetrieveMuOptInStatus portion of the error as it looked rather unique. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything on it. It's clearly some sort of optin dialog, and I took a stab and guessed that MU was Microsoft Updates.

Now, if you're looking to put this into App-V, things should be clicking. One of the biggest rules is to make sure that Windows Update is disabled while you're sequencing because you don't want any service interaction to get recorded into your package.

To make this work in App-V 5, I just enabled the service, installed the application, and then disabled it again. I then went through the registry and cleaned out anyt references to the Windows Update service (there were only a couple and it should be easy to find).

To summarize the problem, the installer is trying to talk to Windows Update to see if you want to use Microsoft Update. It can't talk to Windows Update so it aborts. The fix is to enable Windows Update while the application is installing. You can turn it off as soon as you're done, but it has to be on during the initial portion of the install.